Experience

It seems that I have spent most of my adult life at university. I have degrees in Science, Sociology, Psychology and a doctorate in gender and education. From my biological science training, I can explain and help you understand the physiology of each feeling state – how your heart rate changes in line with your emotional mood-states and I can help you through biofeedback techniques learn skills to gain mastery over undesired emotional states.

My training in Sociology orients me to the importance of human relationships in shaping our life. Research findings in neuroplasticity show images of how the brain is structurally modified by the moment-to-moment quality of our relationships. Psychology has given me a resting place to package my various learnings with understandings of the human condition.

My gender studies have given me a profound appreciation of the gendered cleavages in modern society, the cultural expectations of men and women, which pervade the entire life space we inhabit.  As my university training has spanned across my adulthood, I have simultaneously worked as a clinician in numerous clinical settings: a private psychiatric hospital, a general medical practice, an employee assistance program, Defence Forces (Army, Air Force and Navy), a forensic inpatient hospital, offender rehabilitation services for sex and violent offenders, intervention program for severely disturbed children, child protection services, parental phone counselling support services, relationship counselling and mediation services and Lifeline. In this way, I had the privilege of weaving my training into my clinical practice.

These trainings have moulded a scientific orientation to how I do the art of therapy and an ongoing thirst of evidence-based findings that will enhance the effects of what I already do. It is my practice to focus on developing new skills. For example, in 2014, I focused on mastering the concept of mindsight (Dan Siegel) and the brain, mind and relationships as systems of energy-information flow. A secondary focus in 2014, was to extend my mastery of the Gottman method to couple counselling. My current focus is to integrate an emotional focused approach into my practice.